Why do we reincarnate without our memories?

[Eugene I.]

Now we're finally in position to address the original question "Why do we reincarnate without our memories?" First, we've already saw that what we habitually call memories (as sensory pictures) is not present even after death, let alone be carried in new life. In our new life a completely new bodily complex is being built around which new sensory memories form. What we carry with us is the spiritual capabilities that we have developed. So in certain sense we do incarnate with our memories - when we see them as degrees of freedom of our spiritual being - yet they are not yet recognizable as coming from previous lives. To begin to recognize them as memories we need to become clearly conscious of what exactly passes from incarnation to incarnation. For example, we may have been a philosopher in our previous life. But let's imagine that, like most of our contemporary philosophers, we were simply juggling with words, arranging puzzles of words. We may have lived in Italy and used to arrange Italian words. Now we speak different language. Now even if it was somehow possible to remember these Italian words, they would mean nothing to us (assuming we don't know Italian) - they'll sound as foreign language. We can remember only those things which can fit in our cognitive world as we have it now.

Cleric, a few comments:
- Your view that we lose our human life memories after death as the physical and etheric bodies disintegrate contradicts a large amount of NDE, previous lives memory cases and hypnotic regression evidences where people report recalling their past human lives.
- Even if we assume that your view is true, you did not address the Hedge's question in full. It is still unclear from your explanation why we lose the memories of our pre-birth noncorporeal existence when we reincarnate.

So we see that things are not at all simple. Our consciousness, at any time, is a highly complicated constellation of spiritual factors. This is where the idea of 'pure awareness' is so detrimental. It simply flattens all these factors and considers the way we understand things, the way we can remember them, perceive them, to be pure and fundamental elements of the ground being. The only way we can counteract this spiritual naivety is by investigating the very thinking which sees things in this way and refuses to do that investigation on itself.

I already said that many times but will repeat again: the "passive observation" is only a temporary stage of practice when the practitioners need to disengage from mundane thinking activity in order to focus on the existential aspects of reality. Once this stage is passed, one returns to the active state with full thinking ability. Also, awareness of the whole thinking process and activity and of the origins of our own thoughts, impulses and feelings is also essential part of the healthy nondual; practices.

[Hedge90]

Cleric, thanks for your descriptions. I still intend to respond in substance, but in the meantime I must pose a question to you.
Don't take this is poking at you, because I'm just trying to make sense of things, but I'd like to know your thoughts about why, in your opinion, the kind of spiritual practice you and Ashvin subscribe to do not appear in any of the better-known wisdom traditions?
I'm honestly curious, because I've also read up on Steiner, and in particular I read a number of his lectures about Eastern religions, where he acknowledged that, for example, the Buddha had ascended to a very high state of spiritual realisation, yet he had still not left us teachings about anything similar to spiritual "Thinking".
I hope I'm not misrepresenting you or Steiner, but it struck me as curious, how is it that in the two and a half thousand years since then, no one else ever considered pursuing a path similar to what you condone.

[Cleric K]

- Your view that we lose our human life memories after death as the physical and etheric bodies disintegrate contradicts a large amount of NDE, previous lives memory cases and hypnotic regression evidences where people report recalling their past human lives.

We need to pay attention to what exactly we lose after death. Unless we try to understand the hierarchical structure of consciousness, these things will never become clear.

Imagine you're going through a landscape to visit a friend. You have the most varied perceptions. If we imagine memory in a similar way to a camcorder, this would mean that somehow every frame of our perceptual contents are recorder as blocks of pixels, so to speak. But this is not how memory works. Even neuroscience would agree that no pixel storage has been found in the brain. Instead we continually integrate degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity through which we can recreate the past states. As an analogy, in order to behold the sensory perception of a certain building, you need to activate your will and go there. To view the building once more you need to activate your will again. But what if the building has been destroyed in the meantime? Then you apply your will but the perceptions are not there. But your meaningful intent is still present though. Similarly, an inner experience is a specific hierarchical constellation of forces. To remember that experience we must recreate this constellation to some extent.

The fact that you're going to visit a friend is a higher order wave of consciousness. The sensory perceptions are within its context. Once the physical and etheric body are gone we can't recreate the perceptual details but we livingly experience our relation with or friend and the fact that we went to visit her - all this in a much more deeper way that the way we think about it abstractly now. This may look like as if our conscious experience has become much poorer but this is only because we're used to think materialistically and imagine that the sensory picture is more fundamental than the facts of our soul life that led us to visit our friend. But this is not the case. If we imagine things as a fractal, then our higher order consciousness after death contains within itself the potential for all the possible ways the sensory experience may have gone while still in the body. So we do lose the concrete sensory details but this is only because they are now part of a much richer superposition. I can go here with some quantum analogies but I'm afraid things will become difficult to follow.

With this in mind, we don't forget that we have lived past lives but our consciousness rises to higher order flows. In the soul world we have quite different vision of what the world is. How much we really understand of that vision and how well we'll navigate through it depends on our preparation on Earth. At the soul level we're engaged in a quite different creative process. Our Earthly self in many cases moves completely orthogonally to it. At the soul level our being is like a musical instrument that is continually being refined and attuned. In this sense, at that higher level it's of little significance exactly what sensory pixels we have beheld on our walk. It's of much greater value why we were taking this walk, where we were going, with whom we met, what ideas and feelings we have exchanged and so on. These things we grasp only as abstract thoughts in our intellect but in the higher order they are real living processes which fill our consciousness.

We have such levels of detail everywhere in our Earthly life but they are only imitations of the true spiritual fractal of being. All our technology is built on bottom-up principle. For example, the devices we now use are based on a whole hierarchy, produced by potentially quite independent parties. The silicon chips are at a level closest to the physical, then other parties assemble them in devices. Others write the low level assemblers and compilers. Others write the operating system. Others write the browser that we're now using. These are levels of abstraction. Those who write the code for the browser need not have any idea about the lower levels. But still, their work is dependent on them.

In reality there's true fractal where both bottom-up and top-down activities operate. For this reason, the higher order life of the soul is not simply an epiphenomenon of the movement of some spiritual particles but is the actual formative force for them. The lower order of course feeds back on the higher - it's not a one way top to bottom flow.

I hope this makes it a little clearer. It's like after death we live in the higher order spiritual flow (for example the idea of browser) while all the lower layers pass into something akin to superposition.

Please note, once again I have to mention that NDEs are experienced with the etheric body fully intact. For this reason most of the experiences can be stepped down to sensory-like symbols. If in a NDE we remember soul interaction with another being from a past life, this spiritual gesture will flow into our current etheric organization and it will be clothed in perceptions compatible with our current life.

- Even if we assume that your view is true, you did not address the Hedge's question in full. It is still unclear from your explanation why we lose the memories of our pre-birth noncorporeal existence when we reincarnate.

The above should have made that clear. The reason we lose our memories is because we become entangled on a much lower level of sensory-intellectual patterns of activity. The 'wavelengths' of the different orders are known by attuning our spiritual activity to them. Our sensory life vibrates in very fragmented rhythms (as I tried to illustrate in recently in the visualization). These rhythms are closely related with our physical body. Our spiritual gestures are attuned to it. On the other hand, our pre-birth existence flows within the higher orders of the fractal, so to speak. For example, as we approach the new incarnation, our whole future life is perceived as a prophetic panorama, similarly to the way our past life rises as a memory panorama after death. We behold the general Time-Consciousness structure that we'll be tracing in much greater detail once attuned to the sensory spectrum.

Take a look at something like this:



Try to sense how as we zoom in into the finer levels of detail it becomes quite difficult have proper orientation of where in the large structure we are. It's something similar with the Time-Consciousness gradient but of course with the great difference that the different levels are different levels of consciousness, it's not some self-similar perception repeating, beheld by our immutable pure awareness.

When we see things in this way it becomes understandable. It's not that there's some special mechanism which erases our memory. It's simply that our pre-birth consciousness is different. It flows into a much larger time orders and when we 'zoom in' at our Earthly time-scale, we lose the bigger picture. We're not cut off from it but we need special effort to develop our spiritual activity such that we can raise to the higher order flows while still in the body.

I already said that many times but will repeat again: the "passive observation" is only a temporary stage of practice when the practitioners need to disengage from mundane thinking activity in order to focus on the existential aspects of reality. Once this stage is passed, one returns to the active state with full thinking ability. Also, awareness of the whole thinking process and activity and of the origins of our own thoughts, impulses and feelings is also essential part of the healthy nondual; practices.

Hopefully, what is above hints at the direction where the transfiguration of thinking leads and anyone can decide for themselves if ancient traditions speak of this.

[Cleric K]

Cleric, thanks for your descriptions. I still intend to respond in substance, but in the meantime I must pose a question to you.
Don't take this is poking at you, because I'm just trying to make sense of things, but I'd like to know your thoughts about why, in your opinion, the kind of spiritual practice you and Ashvin subscribe to do not appear in any of the better-known wisdom traditions?
I'm honestly curious, because I've also read up on Steiner, and in particular I read a number of his lectures about Eastern religions, where he acknowledged that, for example, the Buddha had ascended to a very high state of spiritual realisation, yet he had still not left us teachings about anything similar to spiritual "Thinking".
I hope I'm not misrepresenting you or Steiner, but it struck me as curious, how is it that in the two and a half thousand years since then, no one else ever considered pursuing a path similar to what you condone.

One word: evolution. Unless we take seriously that our Earthly state is evolving, things will forever remain unclear. I repeat that the greatest hinderance for proper development is the belief that there's some standard 'realization' which can be attained to in any epoch in the same way. What the child attains to as realization is not the same as what the realization of the adult can be. It's still different from the realization of the wise old man or an angelic being.

[AshvinP]

Cleric, thanks for your descriptions. I still intend to respond in substance, but in the meantime I must pose a question to you.
Don't take this is poking at you, because I'm just trying to make sense of things, but I'd like to know your thoughts about why, in your opinion, the kind of spiritual practice you and Ashvin subscribe to do not appear in any of the better-known wisdom traditions?
I'm honestly curious, because I've also read up on Steiner, and in particular I read a number of his lectures about Eastern religions, where he acknowledged that, for example, the Buddha had ascended to a very high state of spiritual realisation, yet he had still not left us teachings about anything similar to spiritual "Thinking".
I hope I'm not misrepresenting you or Steiner, but it struck me as curious, how is it that in the two and a half thousand years since then, no one else ever considered pursuing a path similar to what you condone.

One word: evolution. Unless we take seriously that our Earthly state is evolving, things will forever remain unclear. I repeat that the greatest hinderance for proper development is the belief that there's some standard 'realization' which can be attained to in any epoch in the same way. What the child attains to as realization is not the same as what the realization of the adult can be. It's still different from the realization of the wise old man or an angelic being.

Hedge,

Another consideration here, if we are speaking of current spiritual thinkers and why there are so few aligned with Steiner's philosophy of Thinking (I realize that was not your question, but maybe some others are wondering that), is as follows, from essay on "phenomenology of mechanism".

The phenomena of mechanism, in its broadest significance, is nothing more complicated than a tragedy of timing. It is two ships passing each other in the pitch dark of night, which is the tail end of the modern age. One ship represents the natural evolution of cognition and the integration of experiential dualities; a steady and sure "union of the opposites" - cognition and perception, mind and matter, noumenon and phenomenon, subject and object, inner and outer. The other ship represents our own individual interest in and attention to Nature's phenomena. As the first ship ascends due to natural evolutionary processes, the second ship descends due to our personal cognitive deficiencies which are deeply tied to the pervasive influence of digital mechanism. When Nature welcomes humanity into her warm embrace, individuals in the developed world get cold feet and flee the altar, choosing instead to fixate on their digital screens.
...
Focused attention, of the sort commonly found in contemplative and meditative practices, is a tool for our cognitive activity to constrain its own endless horizontal thinking by deepening it. This deepening is a dilation of time-experience which moves our cognition up into the realms of the overarching, holistic ideas which structure that experience. Mechanistic thinking is the exact opposite - it takes pride in its ability to absorb more and more ideal content with less and less thinking through the content. That is what the mere mechanical mind labels as "efficiency". The person who is held captive to mechanism in this manner may watch ten times as much content on their mobile phone in one day than the deep thinker manages to perceive while reading a book over a few days or weeks, but it's also likely that very little of that digital content is being attended to carefully, absorbed into living thoughts, and made accessible to long-term memory. Instead, this 'food for thought' is shed from our living cognition, as dead skin is shed from a snake, almost as soon as we manage to digest it.

[Cosmin Visan]

Before reading the full topic, I will just answer the initial post. I think it has to do with what memory actually is. For example, when we read a word, we read it letter by letter, yet at the end it the experience changes and instead of remembering reading it letter by letter we remember reading it as a whole. Similarly with everything... when we listen music we listen note by note, but at the end the experience changes to remembering hearing it holistically. So maybe we do reincarnate with the memories from past lives, but they are changed beyond recognition into a single holistic entity, like for example the experience of being human.

[AshvinP]

Before reading the full topic, I will just answer the initial post. I think it has to do with what memory actually is. For example, when we read a word, we read it letter by letter, yet at the end it the experience changes and instead of remembering reading it letter by letter we remember reading it as a whole. Similarly with everything... when we listen music we listen note by note, but at the end the experience changes to remembering hearing it holistically. So maybe we do reincarnate with the memories from past lives, but they are changed beyond recognition into a single holistic entity, like for example the experience of being human.

Cosmin,

In relation to our discussion on the other thread, would you agree that the examples you use above are referring to ideas which unite the particular letters and notes into a 'holistic entity'? So, in other words, it is our logical ideational activity? Here is an interesting quote from Bergson to ponder in that connection:

"Now, in artistic creation... it seems that the materials we have to work with, words and images for the poet, forms and colors for the painter, rhythms and harmonies for the musician, arrange themselves spontaneously under the idea they are to express, drawn, as it were, by the charm of a superior ideality. Is it not a similar movement, is it not also a state of fascination we should attribute to material elements when they are organized into living beings?"
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind